Skip Links

Network World

Brad Reese

FREE Cisco tools: NetQoS network latency calculator

By Brad Reese on Fri, 09/05/08 - 9:42pm.

Cisco Tools

NetQoS is offering a free tool, the NetQoS Latency Calculator to help network engineers ensure application performance across the WAN.

The company claims this tool allows you to model network latency under a number of different scenarios. It models a client-server environment, where both client and server are attached to local area networks, and each network is attached to a router. The clientside and server-side routers are attached through some kind of wide area link. To calculate latency times, the tool also lets you input arbitrary request and response sizes, and lets you set delays for the client itself, claims NetQoS.

NetQoS Latency Calculator Screenshot:

NetQoS Latency Calculator Screenshot

Then, to model the WAN portion of the connection, you can set router latency, wide area link speed and distance for each of a pair of routers. On the server side, you can set server latency and response size. You can then click the Calculate button to produce response latency and request latency values, with accompanying pie charts to show how overall delay breaks across the various input values provided. You can also use the input data to produce a WAN bar chart that helps model variable data rates for frame relay or constant bit rates on T1 links, claims NetQoS.

Bill Alderson"The latency calculator will tell you how long it would take to do an FTP transfer with different size files, for example,” said Bill Alderson - creator of the calculator and Technology Consulting Officer for NetQoS. "The calculator counts the number of round trips that are required and you can make the size whatever you’d like. Instead of having a packet size with a 1500 or an 8000 byte MTU maximum, you can simply crank in a 450GB file, and it’ll tell you how long it’ll take to serialize that file across the links you have selected."


---------------------------------------------

View more Cisco Tools


Do YOU know of another FREE Cisco tool that Network World readers should be using?

Contact Brad Reese
http://www.BradReese.Com

Search 31,427 Cisco Job Openings

Post Cisco Network Engineer Jobs

View 1,595 items of Refurbished Cisco

Examine CCIE Resumes

Consider 697 Cisco Certified
Network Engineer Resumes

  
Brad's Favorite Top 5 Picks
# 1. Cisco Refurbished
# 2. Cisco Technical Forums
# 3. Cisco vs. Competitor Lab Tests
# 4. Cisco Repair and Hardware Troubleshooting
# 5. Cisco Product Quick Reference Guides, CPQRGs
Brad Reese on Cisco Story Archives Brad Reese on Cisco Story Archives

Cisco Jobs

Cisco Resumes

2008 Cisco Salary Rates

Nine Year Worldwide CCIE Count

  

Latency

0

Hello Sir,
How do i measure Latency and JItter for VoIP network.
Is there any Command line interface which will give me any way to calculate the Latency.
Thank You.

Bill Alderson Technology Consulting Officer for NetQoS Responds

0

Bill Alderson Technology Consulting Officer for NetQoS Responds:

----------------------------

VoIP is two half duplex UDP communication streams, there are no response or acknowledgements of the data. That makes measuring latency difficult for stream protocol applications.

As each phone receives a UDP stream it maintains a latency buffer to eliminate minor variations in jitter. The receive chipset calculates its perceived jitter and reports it to the other phone and the call manager.

Network analyzers pickup and decode these statistics – but monitoring solutions such as NetQoS VoIP Monitor pick up and database these statistics and score them by direction, time, and location to find exceptions from the norm.

We all know when things are going well on the network as there are "no complaints" and when complaints start occurring it’s too late to engage an analyst in a manual manner as the problem is now gone – but the complaints of the behavior continue and are remembered by the users!

The Latency calculator can be used to determine theoretical network queuing, transmission distance and serialization delay caused by link speeds (typically the least common denominator link speed has the greatest affect). So if you are wanting to know the one way latency of a VoIP call from NYC to Qatar of 6700 miles, you’d put in the following data into the calculator:

Latency :1

The actual round trip ping is quite long at 240ms and perhaps is routed across much longer than 6700 miles. Round trip monitoring of other applications can be used to get an idea of what the one way latency is – but remember that you are not concerned with "normal or quiescent" but rather exceptions which cause issues.

BTW: Its not optimal to use VoIP for one way latencies beyond 150 – 200ms and conferencing is near impossible beyond such latency. So the best thing is to monitor and database your VoIP solution to catch exceptions!

View more information about NetQoS VoIP Monitor.

----------------------------

Sincerely,

Brad Reese
http://www.BradReese.Com

NetQoS Latency Calculator (underlying formula)

0

Is it possible to see the underlying latency formula used in your calculator. If proprietary, maybe you can share what factor is applied to the speed of light.

Thanks,

Latency Calculator Calculation

0

Craig, the calculation is pretty basic.

LAN Calculation:
Packetsize / (linkspeed-in-bits-per-second/8)

WAN Insertion Delay
Packetsize / (linkspeed-in-bits-per-second/8)

The WAN distance latency is roughly 1ms per 100 miles on a point-to-point link and 1.5ms per 100 miles on links such as Frame Relay.

If you add the LAN insertion delays, WAN insertion delays, and the amount of time spent waiting on the WAN link, you get the overall latency.

You do need to know the number of "application turns" to accurately calculate the overall delay. This is the number of requests make by the client that require the application to wait the full roundtrip delay of the circuit. For example when copying a file using Server Message Block (SMB), aka CIFS, each SMB Read Request counts as a turn. If the roundtrip delay of the circuit is 100ms, you will need to add 100ms for each read request.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Welcome, visitor. Register Log in
About Brad Reese on Cisco

Brad Reese cofounded BradReese.Com Cisco Refurbished, which enables affordable Cisco networks globally by assuring customer satisfaction with guaranteed one year warranties on both Cisco Repair as well as Refurbished Cisco.

Don't be shy, contact Brad Reese online or call him Toll Free:

866-864-0506

International callers may wish to call Brad by dialing:

850-364-4115

Archives
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
Categories
Allan Sulkin - founder and president of enterprise communications systems and applications consultancy - TEQConsult Group
Careers
Chambers and his Board of Dirctors urged Cisco shareholders to vote NO
China networking marketplace
Christian Brothers Investment Services notice
Cisco
Cisco TelePresence
Cisco TelePresence revenue
Cisco Unified Communications Support for Microsoft Windows 7
Cisco engineer - Kevin Murphy
Cisco has now become the target of unflattering employee reviews
Cisco is warning Unified Communications customers about NOT successfully offering support for Microsoft Windows 7
Cisco is well known as being one of the best companies to work for
Cisco stock chart for the last 10 years
Cisco will have no liability for any delay in delivery
Cisco's 1st Quarter Other Product Revenue By Fiscal Year
Cisco's F1Q10 earnings call
Cisco's Form 10-Q
Cisco's new Stock Incentive Plan as amended and restated
Cisco's upcoming annual stockholder's meeting
Daniel Berg - Skype's CTO
Data Center
Dave Donatelli - HP executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers and networking
FNF
Father of SIP - Jonathan Rosenberg
Financial windfall for Cisco shareholders
Flexible NetFlow
Flip video camcorder
Flip video camcorder revenue
Gilbert Public School's $3.5 million network upgrade to HP
Gilbert Public Schools Board President - Thad Stump
Gilbert Public Schools assistant superintendent - Barb VeNard
Glassdoor.com is financially backed by 2 of the leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms - Benchmark Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures
HP also bid on the project
HP purchasing 3Com
HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy
HP's acquisition of 3Com
John Chambers has had some good paydays as the CEO of Cisco
LANs / WANs
Microsoft
NBAD
NetFlow
NetFlow add-ons
Network Behavior Anomaly Detection
Network Management
Popular online career and workplace community - Glassdoor.com
ProCurve ONE alliance
Proposal submitted by Christian Brothers Investment Services
Proxy resolution during Cisco's annual meeting
Rosenberg is now Skype's Chief Technology Strategist
SMB
Say on executive pay
Security
Skills and abilities of Skype CTO Daniel Berg
Skype announced Roseberg jumped ship from Cisco
Skype's Chief Technology Strategist - responsible for Skype's overall architecture and technology strategy
So how does one verify that Glassdoor's information is really from Cisco employees?
Software
Superintendent Dave Allison
TelePresence revenue
VoIP / Convergence
When Cisco used its common stock to buy Linksys and Pure Digital
Who's right about Cisco's work environment - Fortune or Glassdoor?
Windows 7
Windows 7 just not worth an all-out urgent effort by Cisco to support
Wireless / Mobile
On The Web
Twitter